Using the self_link attribute

Note

The code for this section is under chap02/self-link in the GitHub repo of this book.

In the for_each example, we used the name attribute of the subnetwork resource to specify the subnet for our VM:

subnetwork = google_compute_subnetwork.this['iowa'].name

In Google Cloud, nearly every resource has a unique name, but it is better to use the self_link attribute, which is a unique Google Cloud construct. To understand self_link, let’s look at the details of the Iowa subnet using the gcloud command:

$ gcloud compute networks subnets describe iowa \
--region us-central1
..
gatewayAddress: 192.168.1.1
id: '4434945742234922953'
ipCidrRange: 192.168.1.0/24
..
selfLink: https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/tf-gcp-01/regions/us-central1/subnetworks/iowa
stackType: IPV4_ONLY

Then look at the same resource using the terraform state show command:

$ terraform state show   'google_compute_subnetwork...